6 Free Financial Modeling Lessons...and More.

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 8:39am

@Addinator I think a couple of the other ones are free as well. I want to say the intro to Rails course is free. Anyway, Codeschool is $25 a month for unlimited access to all their courses.

@surferdude No, this isn't something to put on your resume, not unless you get really good at it. This is just an intro course to brush the broad strokes. That said, spending your free time learning R is pretty smart if you know you ultimately want to work in trading. The problem with listing a course like this on a resume is that you run the risk of coming up against an interviewer who really knows his shit and then you're screwed.

Did this class last night (I

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:09am

Did this class last night (I already know R; I just wanted to see how low the barriers to entry to learning it had become). It's actually a pretty solid, quick overview. Obviously, you'd need to complement this with a book, and there's nothing like a genuine need (i.e., a project at work, a statistical relationship you're trying to get at, etc.) to drive the points home. Still, there are worse ways to kill time.

To echo Eddie's points: Get technical -- even if you're in IBD and the most complicated thing you do is figure out if the decrease in accounts payable increases cash or decreases cash. If you move onto a hedge fund role or -- hell, even a corporate strategy role these days -- and you're not prepared for the Big Data Revolution the Tech kids are talking about, then at some point, someone who did choose to get technical is going to eat your lunch. We need more multi-faceted people in this world.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your bent), I don't really believe Finance is a field that would benefit from turning into a quantitative pseudo-science. (We've all seen where that's gotten Economics). There's always -- always -- going to be a need for people who do the fundamental analysis well, and all the R in the world isn't really useful if you don't have an underlying passion for/understanding of the business environment in which you're operating. The world is also much too complicated to be modeled using least squares regression, though I'm sure there's a Data Miner somewhere trying to prove me wrong, with a model infinitely more complicated. Still, choosing to ignore these recent developments is like a baseball scout choosing to ignore Sabermetrics in a post-Moneyball world. Do so at your own peril.

^^^Great points. Quick

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:21am

^^^Great points. Quick question: having gone through the course already, where would you say someone starting fresh ends up by the end of the course? I mean, what level of understanding/proficiency does the course provide?

What a coincidence. I began

Firefox

(Orangutan, 272

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:34am

What a coincidence. I began learning R very recently because I heard it was used by quants and simply wanted to try out something new. Would you say it's more useful to know than MATLAB? I've been learning both, but I'd like to focus on one.

Thanks for the post

R and Excel aren't really

chicandtoughness

(Senior Gorilla, 979

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:36am

R and Excel aren't really that comparable, given the usage and amount of data each can hold (and still operate at a reasonable speed). I've done multiple regressions in R with well over 7000 rows and 50 columns, and it has held up gracefully. Excel on the other hand stumbles over itself trying to open.

R is more on the level of your typical statistical software packages -- Stata, SAS, the works. All three are better to know than MATLAB - I can't think of anyone in Economics or Finance who uses MATLAB over SAS or Stata. R itself has quite a steep learning curve, in my opinion, but once you grasp it, it's amazing to use. I can't see most people in finance having a need for it besides the quants, though.

"Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
Currently: quantitative marketing/business development
Previously: management consulting, investment banking

Pancakes: What a coincidence.

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:39am

Pancakes:

Thanks for the post

Isn't there some cost associated with using MATLAB? R is 100% open source and free. I seem to remember something about MATLAB costing something.

Just FYI: I have nothing to do with any of this stuff. It's all way over my head. So if you're wondering if I'm taking this R course, I'm not. Fortunately I've attained an age and level of success that I can pay somebody else to learn it if I need it.

Edmundo Braverman: ^^^Great

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 10:15am

Edmundo Braverman:

I'm probably going to run into a bit of Professor syndrome -- i.e., I know it all so it's hard to see it from the perspective of someone just starting out. However, what I can safely say is that things that took me hours and hours to get down, this class at least lets you know exists, and how to utilize them simply, so that you can approach them with some level of understanding, and probably target your search more effectively. (Two quick parenthetical comments: (1) Programming is basically getting really good at how to find things on StackOverflow; don't let anyone tell you differently; (2) I had to teach myself R so that I could take the upper division Statistics courses at my school; R wasn't a standalone class and they just expected you to learn or be left behind. Not surprisingly, I went to a public school, and I spent a lot of time on Google).

For example, reading files into R, for someone who has never programmed before, is actually a bit of a pain to figure out. Finding a self-contained tutorial online is hard, so you'll usually do something like... 'How do I read a file into R?'... 'Okay, cool, I have this thing. How can I use this thing.' And it's just a lot slower and more, as Nassim Taleb would put it, 'stochastic tinkering.' This class alleviates the pain.

I wish they'd covered the 'apply' family of functions since that is a crucial element of R, and something that makes it relatively different from other programming languages.

Still, hard to complain when something is so brief, so in demand and so free.

TL;DR: Lets you know which things exist and how to use them. Also look up apply functions. Wish MOOC's had existed earlier.

The full version of MATLAB

Firefox

(Orangutan, 272

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 9:58am

The full version of MATLAB costs a small fortune--about $2,000 I believe. You can get a free trial though, and there's a relatively inexpensive student version available for $99.

Oh, and I would also add that

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 10:01am

Oh, and I would also add that this class teaches you how to be a 'user' of R, and not so much an 'R programmer.' A subtle point, but one worth mentioning. Luckily, for most people, that's probably going to be enough unless they become more interested/need to do much more complicated things (in which case you're probably going to need to learn other programming languages as well).

R is very very nice, but

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 10:47am

R is very very nice, but honestly slow. We started running into problems where our models (which had decently efficient algorithms) were taking about 5 minutes to readjust, given no big changes to the underlying data set. If that happened, we had to rebuild which took 20 minutes. The big advantage of R is since it's a statistical program at heart, there's tons of great packages people have added on to cover some things you'd really like (parallel processing and some polynomial stuff were the big things).

Learning that and something like Python/C++ if you ever want to do complicated stuff with big data would be very good (aka not IBD level models). And, Python means you won't hate yourself. Because I really hate myself when I try to learn C++. I think since Python is very nice, people are developing modules to support some important features for it. We saw a parallel processing module that was very nice, but even without using it, Python was faster than R using parallel processing (again, that's a scale thing though. As our models got bigger, I'm sure we would have had to to parallel in python too).

For those of you who know some R stuff, check out a package called pandas for Python. It adds data tables which are similar to R, but work SO MUCH faster (for example, the melt function is much faster. It literally shaved minutes off our computations).

.

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 10:54am

I used STATA and Matlab

ucmaroon47

(Senior Baboon, 206

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 11:33am

I used STATA and Matlab extensively in college for regressions in economics... Very similar to R, and all are wonderful tools for statistical analysis. Great for anyone quantitatively focused or just wants to learn some small coding

And so it goes

I actually just signed up for

TheKing

(Senior Neanderthal, 5,141

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 11:51am

Check out my WSO Blog

TheKing: I actually just

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:10pm

@TheKing I used Codeacademy

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:12pm

Can anyone recommend a good

accountingbyday

(Senior Gorilla, 809

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:17pm

Both Udacity and Coursera

mojo12

(Senior Chimp, 29

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:36pm

Now that you guys mention it,

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:41pm

@accountingbyday I took Peter

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 12:49pm

atomic: @accountingbyday I

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 1:08pm

@atomic Speaking of Coursera

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 1:22pm

chicandtoughness: R and Excel

ING

(Senior Chimp, 18

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 1:28pm

Eddie, it's a free version of

IlliniProgrammer

(Almost Human, 9,177

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 1:52pm

Work hard, play hard.

I've been wanting to get into

Yekrut

(Baboon, 102

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 2:01pm

IlliniProgrammer: Eddie, it's

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 2:02pm

canas15: atomic: @accountin

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 2:20pm

What's a pirate's favorite

BTbanker

(Senior Neanderthal, 5,329

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 2:45pm

"A man generally has two reasons for doing anything. One that sounds good, and the real one." - J.P. Morgan

atomic: (Not to take anything

(Human, 14,318

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 2:45pm

R is a great tool and has

Pwntatoes

(Senior Chimp, 18

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 3:01pm

"Honey can you please pass the mashed pwntatoes"

atomic: (On a related note,

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 3:02pm

IlliniProgrammer: Eddie, it's

wolverine19x89

(King Kong, 1,844

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 3:06pm

If your dreams don't scare you, then they are not big enough.

"There are two types of people in this world: People who say they pee in the shower, and dirty fucking liars."-Louis C.K.

Eddie - anything by Code

Frieds

(Neanderthal, 2,530

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 3:42pm

wolverine19x89: IlliniProgr

(Baboon, 133

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 3:42pm

R is free as is the manual.

MonkeyMath

(Baboon, 139

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 4:54pm

The learning curb for R is

cibo

(Baboon, 163

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 7:08pm

canas15: atomic: (On a

(Baboon, 160

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 7:39pm

BTbanker: What's a pirate's

Kenny Powers

(Senior Gorilla, 858

Points)

on 12/6/12 at 8:08pm

pick em, lick em, stick em

canas15: For those of you who

Macro Arbitrage

(King Kong, 1,369

Points)

on 12/7/12 at 4:52pm

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

Macro